Scoutmaster Podcast 205

Hi, this is Rob Pleasure and I'm the Scoutmaster for Troop 18 in Muskega, Wisconsin. This edition of the Scoutmaster podcast is sponsored by backers just like me.

And now it's the old Scoutmaster. This just in from the ScoutmastersCGcom Institute for Advanced Camping Physics. After extensive study, it has been revealed that the probability that a given piece of gear is left at home is indeed proportionate to its usefulness.

How about that? I think we kind of suspected that. Yeah, the most important thing that you actually need on a camping trip. You can see a picture of it in your mind sitting on your table back at home sometimes. Oh my, I've been there, I know you have too. Hey, listen, this is podcast number 205..

Well, welcome back to the Scoutmaster podcast. This is Clarke Green. Let's take a look in the mailbag. This week, Bill Monroe posted a review of the Scoutmaster CG app, And if you want to have an easy way to access the blog and the podcast, you can get the app on Google Play and you can also get it on iTunes. But he said it's a great resource. Just as our Troop is having questions, Scoutmaster CG seems to be right there offering help.

That's right, Bill. We have agents everywhere reporting in on the activity in your troops right now. I know it might seem like it, but, truth be told, we all go through the same things and we all have the same questions And getting together here can give you a little bit of relief and it can be some help sometimes. Scott Oath wrote on our Facebook page that he had just returned from teaching at Northern Tears, Ockpick Cold Weather Leader Training. It was an awesome week. He said it was very cold.

We had our crews out for the night at minus 35 degrees Fahrenheit. That's really cold, Scott. I've also taught at Northern Star Council's Minneapolis-St Paul Winter Camping School.

Ockpick is a program that happens up at Northern Tier one of the BSA's National High Adventure Bases And if you'd like to check out what happened up there that week, Scott put some pictures up and talks about the whole course- Really interesting photo journal that he set up And there's a link on how to find that on the post that contains this podcast. We also heard from James Keefe and James said Great job with everything. I always look forward to new posts and it's even better to catch up with the new Android app. From time to time I still browse scoutmastercgcom, but the site isn't displaying properly in my preferred browser, and that is Firefox. Thanks for all your hard work on the behalf of scouts and scouters everywhere.

Well, thank you, James. I know that the old site, the cranky old site, does not display right in every single browser, And I've known about the Firefox problem for a little while.

I know I've been talking about this for several weeks now, but as a result of the support that we have received from those of you who have become scoutmastercgcom backers, I'm excited to announce that by the end of this week- yes, actually this week- the new scoutmastercgcom will be live. I can't tell you exactly what day and what hour, because it takes time for the changes on the site to propagate out throughout the web, But the process should be complete, if all goes well, by the end of the week.

Now the new version of the site has some significant new features that I hope you'll find useful, and we've talked about them a little bit here. There's going to be a Scouter's Forum, which will be a web forum for discussion with your fellow scouters from all over the country and all over the world. There's a whole new section that we introduced to you last week, called Scout's Forum, and it's specifically for youth leaders and it's authored by Enoch, and it will have its own forum exclusively for youth leaders.

Our Scout Circle presentations, our monthly live video presentations, are now going to be hosted at scoutmastercgcom, and I'm working on a live chat feature that will make interacting with the presentation a whole lot simpler. I'm also working on a couple of other features too, so stay tuned, but by the end of this week I really, really hope you're going to start to see those changes at the new scoutmastercgcom. Once again, this would not be possible if it wasn't for people becoming backers, and becoming a backer means that you're helping out financially with the blog and the podcast and all of the resources that we work to create. If you're a regular reader or listener and you find what we're doing has been helpful to you, you can help keep things up and running by becoming a scoutmastercgcom backer. Funds from backers go towards the expenses of producing and publishing the blog and the podcasts and the videos that are becoming a valuable resource to scouters all over the world.

So go to scoutmastercgcom and follow the link to become a backer In this week's podcast. Well, we're going to talk about a familiar subject. They came up again this week on a conversation that I had with a scouter friend.

Honestly, I don't think it's something that we can talk about too much, but we'll be talking about leadership positions, positions of responsibility and how to evaluate them, And then we have several great email questions that came in over the past week. That's going to take up the rest of the podcast.

So let's get started. Shall we Scout MasterChip? In seven minutes Or less, Let's go.

I was having an online conversation with a scouter friend and he said that when a scout goes for a Scoutmaster conference or border review, there's nothing that can necessarily be done to prevent that scout from claiming the fulfillment of a leadership position, even if they never did anything for it, And that he was trying to create standards, specific for their troop, that will still meet the BSA expectations but aren't so rigid that they scare scouts away from leadership positions or prevent good scouts who are growing and showing effort but don't meet all the standards from getting credit. And this sounds like a great idea, doesn't it? A lot of scouts reach the point where they're a little frustrated with their ability to inspire scouts towards responsibility and leadership. They see themselves evaluating positions of responsibility- We're going to talk about that in depth here- But they see themselves trying to evaluate this and they don't really have any standards or any written things to hand and they feel like it's a very difficult process and that there are scouts who don't do anything in a leadership position of responsibility other than wearing a patch, and they feel like this is unfair.

I want to unpack the whole subject once again and talk about it once again, because it is something that comes up frequently. Now, you can't and shouldn't create a set of standards for this.

Now think about this. If a set of standards that are written down somewhere, some metrics, that kind of pin all this down- would be useful, Somebody would have come up with these and they would be printed in the Scoutmaster Handbook- Right. But you're not going to find anything like that in an entire century of Scoutmaster Handbooks. We don't need them. We don't want to address the question with that kind of an answer.

I want to further say it's impossible for a scout to get to the end of the tenure in his position of responsibility and for there to be any question if they have fulfilled that tenure, if the Scoutmaster is doing their job. We need to talk about an important distinction because, in the shorthand that we develop as Scouters we call the Senior Patrol Leader, Patrol Leader, Quartermaster, Scribe and all the other positions that are defined in the Scout Handbook to be leadership positions. But if you look carefully you'll see that all the requirements in our life in Eagle do not call these leadership positions at all. They call them positions of responsibility.

One of the other perennial questions is: is how does somebody like the Scribe or the Quartermaster demonstrate leadership? Well, not every position that a Scout occupies in a troop is necessarily a leadership position. Some of them are required that a Scout be responsible for what needs to be done to get the job complete correct.

So there's an important distinction here. It's important to look at these positions for what they are: Positions of responsibility.

So what we are evaluating principally is not some kind of fuzzy leadership standard. We are looking at the level of responsibility that Scouts progress in, both through the tenure in one of those positions.

Now, does that make sense? It should be a reasonably simple thing to do. It's the level of progress in responsibility that Scouts achieve in the tenure of that position.

Now I want to go back to the idea that it's impossible to get to a Scoutmaster conference or a border review and have there be any question as to whether these things were fulfilled. If the Scoutmaster is doing their job- And what I mean by that is I talk to each one of my Scouts holding a position of responsibility several times a month. I know what they're doing. If there are any concerns about how they're doing the job, we talk about them.

We don't wait six months later at a Scoutmasters conference for me to announce: well, I've been watching you do this job and I don't think you're doing it very well, so I'm not going to count this towards your advancement. That's unfair. I make sure that Scouts know what is expected of them, largely by asking them to tell me what they think is expected of them.

When they tell me what the job that they're taking on involves and what they feel constitutes success in that position, then we have a shared understanding of what's going on. I may add to what they think they may have, but not usually.

They usually get it, And then I'm very conscious of keeping up with them. If they don't show up, it's my job to find out why. If things are going badly, I talk to the Scout and I encourage them to do better.

Again, by asking them questions about what's going on, I get them to explain to me what they are doing, or perhaps what they're not doing, And I ask: if you were me right now, would you sign off the requirement related to this position of responsibility for your next rank? Would you do that for yourself?

Now, sometimes this talk can get a little strained, but Scouts are good people and they get it and they do what needs to be done the majority of the time. I've learned the hard way that Scouts have all the answers when I limit myself to asking questions, And this is a hard one for me.

But if I take the time to really listen- and again, not so easy for me- I can get a good idea of what they're thinking and we develop a shared understanding about these things. If I was to just dictate to them a job description- and I had a checklist of metric evaluations that I was going to make about the way that they're doing it- that's not necessarily a shared understanding, is it?

Now I will tell you that, as a younger Scoutmaster, like you, I was frustrated with the kind of cavalier way that Scouts treat their responsibilities. Working with the committee chairman, at one point we decided that we were we had had about enough of that and we created a leadership contract explaining exactly what the responsibilities were, and we asked the Scout to sign that contract and we did this with a great moment in ceremony and we tried to emphasize to them how important it was to sign a contract and that this was something that represented that they understood exactly what was happening. What a great idea that seemed to be.

I mean, all a 13 to a 17 year old needs is something like a contract and then, being magically, they'll take things seriously. Now, of course, these contracts weren't worth the paper that they were printed on. They had zero effect, because we're working with boys between ages of 13 and 17 for the most part in these positions of responsibility. They don't understand these things. That's why we're there to get them to understand, to help them progress in responsibility, And these silly contracts that we came up with really just served as a way to humiliate or bledge and Scouts, as righteous adults often like to do. I've talked about this in the past with several different things in Scouting.

Here's what's important in these kind of judgment call: advancement requirements Not the achievement of some particular standard, but the progress that a Scout makes during his tenure in the position, and that is a very individual standard. Some Scouts are tremendously responsible and they progress to being even more responsible during the tenure in that position. Some Scouts, just by nature, are not very responsible. They're not very awake and they don't look around and they don't see what needs to be done and they have to be reminded constantly. After a number of months occupying a position of responsibility, has their awareness and has their own sense of personal responsibility and teamwork developed. That's the standard that we're looking for.

So, just to review, let's start talking in terms of positions of responsibility rather than leadership positions. That, I think, helps clarify the matter. Yes, we're still developing leadership.

Yes, we're still doing all of those things, but I think it helps clarify it in your mind if you think about the development of responsibility. Second, we are looking for progress. We haven't ever in a century of Scouting we haven't seen it necessary to create a specific metric standard that indicates a Scout is responsible, And the reason we haven't done it is because it's based on individual progress.

Now, I know we'll come back and we'll talk about this again and again. It's one of the most important things for us to understand to Scouters and it helps us achieve the aims of Scouting when we apply it properly. Two one, let's start the fun.

Email. That is, folks, And here's an answer to one of your emails. Oh, we had a number of email questions come in this week. We heard from Tracy, who wrote in to say this: my son has completed all the requirements for Eagle except the Eagle border review. He had all of his requirements signed off before January 1st 2014..

Does he have to have cooking Meribadge when all he really needs to have is his Eagle border review? His Scoutmaster seems to think he needs to earn cooking Meribadge since it's 2014..

Now he really has no problem doing the Meribadge, but it doesn't seem fair to me. Is there any way I can find this information? Any help would be appreciated.

That's a really good question and I'm sure that it's occurring in other places, so I think it's worth talking about here on the podcast. What I did just to make sure I had this right, was I shared Tracy's question with the National Advancement Team and you can get in touch with the National Advancement Team anytime at this email address.

So you're ready. It's advancementteam, advancementteam, advancementteam, advancementteam at scoutingorg and within a day or so you'll get a good answer back. It's a great resource. I got this answer back. If all Eagle requirements 1 through 6 have been completed by 12,, 31,, 13 and all that is remaining is the border review, then cooking Meribadge is not required.

So that is about as authoritative as an answer as you can get and I hope that helps resolve the issue. Also heard from Christine Bennett, who had this question: where do we display old rank patches? At a recent court of honor I saw several scouts who had previously earned rank patches sewn on the back of their Meribadge sash.

Is this acceptable? Well, Christine, this is a pretty easy answer. It's in the Guide to Awards in Insignia published by the BSA. What you're dealing with here is called XS Insignia.

These are rank patches that the scouts have earned and they've moved on, and so they have a new patch on their uniform. So what do they do with the old ones?

Well, and this is what the guide says, with the exception of Cub Scout badges, of rank and arrow points, which all stay on the uniform during the whole time of boy, as a Cub Scout, members wear only the insignia that shows their present status in the movement. Members should make every effort to keep their uniforms neat and uncluttered. Previously earned badges in Insignia not representing present status. Make a fine display on a red patch vest or a blanket or in a frame or something like that. Boy Scouts may wear only temporary patches, That's like Campery patches and things like that. No badges of rank on the back of the Meribad sash.

So that's pretty clear, isn't it? Now my personal advice to all of us is to wear the insignia and uniform properly and be a good example of that And to answer politely if we're asked questions about how to wear patches or how to wear the uniform, but to refrain from correcting anybody other than the Scouts in our own unit. And even then we're going to make those corrections in the best spirit of being helpful and friendly and kind. Right And courteous, Christine, I hope that helps answer your question.

James Zappelli is Scoutmaster of Troop 208 and he wrote in to ask: does your troop use the troop program features booklets as an aid to planning troop meetings? Do your Scouts find this to be a helpful resource?

Would you be willing to share a copy of your troops yearly plan and or a copy of actual written plans for one of the troop meetings? I'm striving to do a better job in teaching and coaching our Scouts on how to run a successful, productive, fun troop meeting.

Well, Jim, we are usually about three months ahead of ourselves so far as the annual plan goes. Now I know most people have it a little more together and they have an annual plan mapped out.

We have target dates for everything and we let everybody know, and, but at least three months ahead of time we have everything locked down. Some people, like I said, are a little bit better at that than we are. As for meeting plans, I doubt that there's much that gets written down. I occasionally look over the senior patrol leader's shoulder at what they have scrawled on a piece of paper, but to me it looks like a Kenea form tablet from the Mesopotamians.

You know, My Scouts are never all that interested in writing things down, even though I ask them to and I encourage them to all the time. Not all that interested to do that, but they manage to present some pretty good meetings anyway. I find this endlessly puzzling. I guess my memory and the way I need to do things.

I've got to put things on a piece of paper, but maybe when you're younger you don't have to do that quite so much. I would say that most of their meetings are fun, probably fewer in number are productive, but they all seem to be successful. Somehow. Our patrol leaders council meets just before and just after every meeting and they go over the next meeting's plans.

Now they usually have some sort of idea of what they want to do, but every once in a while they don't prepare and things go south and we use that as a teachable moment. I frequently see them sitting at a table before a meeting is going to begin and I ask what they're doing.

They usually look up at me and they said: well, we're planning. And I ask them if they are done planning actually- and they need to start preparing. And they kind of roll their eyes at me and they go: yeah, you're right, and they get up from the table and they start preparing. Scouts plan at the speed of talk.

You know who's going to do what. When are they going to do it? That's basically their plan. It takes them 5 minutes at most to plan a meeting. What they often forget to do is get up from the table at that point and prepare what they're going to do. They think planning and preparation is the same thing.

So maybe one of the keys to helping your scouts figure this out is differentiating between planning and preparation. Planning takes 5 minutes.

You figure out who's going to do what and when they're going to do it, and then you got to get up from the table and you got to go and prepare for it. You actually have to prepare for those things.

You can't just talk about them and consider them done, right, James? I hope that helps. Chris Johnson got in touch with us via the app and he said: hello. First off, I just found the podcast and website in the app and they're awesome. I've been a Scoutmaster in northern Indiana for 5 years and I love it.

I was speaking to a scout recently and, inspired by what I heard on your podcast, I asked him: why do you want to be a scout? And without missing a beat, he looked at me and said: I don't want to be a scout.

My parents pushed me into scouts, so that's why I'm here. I was kind of shocked- I've never had a scout say this to me before- and I was taken aback. After we sat and talked for a while, I found out that he missed his dad, who travels all week. I told him that we would talk again soon, but in the meantime, I asked him to do three things: To think about the scout, oath and law and do his best to put it into practice, and that on his way home from the meeting every week. To think about the things that he liked about the meeting. And to think about how scouting might be able to help him in his future, and why.

And then we'll talk about that when we get back together. I'm curious to know how you would have handled this. I appreciate your time and keep up the good work. Thank you well. Thanks, Chris, for getting in touch.

I think you handled your reluctant scout very well. You sat and you listened and you learned something about what was going on. You encouraged him and you let him know that you'd both be making the best of what, for him, is a very difficult situation.

I think it's good to remember that boys are kind of barometric when it comes to changing attitudes. If you haven't noticed right, They can be on top of the world one moment, down in the dumps the next. They're looking for the same thing.

We're all looking for some affirmation in somebody to tell them that they're okay and that we all have difficult, challenging times, but we get over them. Whenever I'm faced with this sort of thing. I try my best to think about what I would want to hear if I was in that scout's shoes. Your reply wasn't judgmental or discouraging.

You listen carefully and you respond it appropriately, and I think that's the best we can hope for. It's amazing, isn't it, What simple kindness can do and how profoundly it can affect the life of a scout.

I don't think I could offer you much more advice over what you did, Chris, I think you got this one right. Thanks for getting in touch. If you have a question, you can get in touch with me, and you're going to find out how to do that in just a moment.